Good morning. Amid ever-shifting regulations, Airbnb Inc. is taking steps to promote more inclusive lodgings on its site after facing accusations from renters who say they were discriminated against by hosts because of race or other characteristics. For customer-facing companies, at the very least, there seems little wiggle room. The room-sharing company said Thursday it would minimize users’ photos during the booking process, and require antibias training for its employees, plus create a team focused on promoting diversity, among other changes.

Some would-be renters have contended that Airbnb hosts denied them lodging after identifying their race or sexual identity through their photos, names or other means, Greg Bensinger writes. The San Francisco company has sought to damp the controversies, in part, by hiring former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Laura Murphy, a former American Civil Liberties Union director, to advise the company. Risks abound today for U.S. companies and states that don’t include everyone, because the war for talent knows no gender or race.

CFO JOURNAL TODAY

August doldroms for pensions. Corporate pension plans muddled through August as flat stock markets and tightening credit spreads kept plans from making up ground lost this year, Vipal Monga reports. The funded status of companies in the S&P 500 declined last month by a percentage point to 76.7% according to consulting firm Aon Hewitt. Pension assets returned a meager tenth of a percent for the month and interest rates fell, which pushed down funding levels.

ECB decision gives hope, for now. With the European Central Bank on Thursday deciding to keep interest rates and its asset purchasing program unchanged, companies like Telecom Italia SpA are more confident about their long-term financing plans. “Knowing that there is an important, near-certain buyer is very reassuring,” says Telecom Italia CFO Piergiorgio Peluso. However, that confidence may not be enough to immediately spur widespread investment, Nina Trentmann reports.

Firms ditch treasuries. Corporations cut holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds to an 11-month low in September, in response to a more hawkish stance from the Federal Reserve. The share of corporate cash invested in U.S. government bonds fell to the lowest level since October 2015. moves come as some company treasurers opt to lock in recent gains on Treasury bonds prices, while others shed government bonds on anticipation of an interest rate increase, Tatyana Shumsky writes.

THE DAY AHEAD

Grocery games.Food-price deflation may be a pleasant surprise for shoppers, but many others aren’t quite so enthused, Steven Russolillo writes for Ahead of the Tape. We saw it yesterday with Sprouts Farmers Markets Inc., and earlier Supervalu Inc., and we’ll get a fresh read when Kroger Co. reports today.

CORPORATE NEWS

A bicyclist rides his bike past a Google sign.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News

Google to buy Apigee.Alphabet Inc.’s Google is buying software company Apigee Corp. for roughly $625 million, the latest move to bolster its offerings to corporate customers. Apigee specializes in application programming interfaces, which have become increasingly important software because they serve as the conduit for automated communication between companies’ digital systems and their partners and customers.

MasterCard charged. In 2014, the European Court of Justice ruled that regulators were right to condemn the cost of its interchange fees - the fees retailers pay banks to process card payments, the BBC reports. MasterCard lowered its fees but now faces a claim for damages for 16 years of charging from 1992 to 2008. As the Journal reports, the claim is nearly $19 billion, and could be the biggest in U.K. history.

EPP backs away from Williams. Enterprise Products Partners LP is no longer pursuing a deal to merge with pipeline rival Williams Cos., Enterprise said Thursday. The company confirmed it had approached Williams regarding a possible combination, but said it is withdrawing the offer.

Former American Realty CFO gets pinched. Federal prosecutors charged two former executives of American Realty Capital Properties Inc. on Thursday with overstating the real-estate investment firm’s financial results. The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office charged the firm’s former chief financial officer, Brian Block, with securities fraud, among other charges. A spokesman for the office said the firm’s former chief accounting officer, Lisa McAlister, pleaded guilty in connection with the alleged scheme and is cooperating.

Pulte changes the guards. PulteGroup Inc. appointed a new chief executive and named the grandson of its founder to its board, resolving the public dispute between company management and the founder over the future of the home builder. The company said Thursday that Ryan Marshall, its president, would immediately become CEO. William J. “Bill” Pulte, the grandson of the founder with whom he shares a name, is being added to the board of directors.

REGULATION

Goldman as a test case? Two U.S. financial regulators pressed for new limits on banks’ involvement in commodities and other businesses outside traditional lending, a move that could hit Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and some of its large peers. The moves on Thursday amounted to a signal that regulators aren’t done scrutinizing businesses beyond basic loans and deposit taking.

Galaxy setback. U.S. air-safety regulators have taken the unusual step of singling out Samsung Electronics Co.’s Galaxy Note 7 smartphone as a potential airborne fire hazard, urging passengers to avoid using the devices entirely on board airliners, dealing another blow to the technology giant’s smartphone recovery efforts.

ECONOMY

ECB holds steady.The European Central Bank has kept its main interest rates on hold at zero for another month. The central bank's 25-member governing council left its benchmark borrowing rate at zero, the BBC reports.

BOJ needs coy bonds. Japan’s central bank is facing a new problem: It could be running out of government bonds to buy. The Bank of Japan is snapping up the equivalent of more than $750 billion worth of government debt a year in an effort to spur inflation and growth. At that rate, analysts say, banks could run out of government debt to sell within the next 18 months.

CFO MOVES

Xerox Corp., the Norwalk, Conn., copying company named Brian Webb-Walsh finance chief of Conduent Inc., the business-processing-services company it plans to separate from by the end of the year. Compensation details weren’t immediately available. Mr. Webb-Walsh is currently CFO of its Xerox Services arm, and has been with Xerox for nearly two decades.

Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd., the Canadian rail operator, named Nadeem Velani interim CFO, effective Sept. 9. It said CFO Mark Erceg will leave and return to the U.S. to become CFO of an undisclosed U.S. company. Mr. Velani was most recently the company’s vice president of investor relations. He previously worked at Canadian National Rialway Co. Compensation information wasn’t immediately available.

THE WEEKEND READER

Every weekend we select a handful of in-depth articles we think are worth a bit of your time, either because they peel back the layers on a compelling business story, or somehow make us look at business in a different light.

Goal posts are good, unless they’re bad. Goals can increase staff motivation and performance, of course, and are tied to pay, rewards, and bonuses. Yet they have been linked to unethical behavior, Colm Healy and Karen Niven write from across the pond for Harvard Business Review. Research shows such goals encourage cheating, they say, but why then isn’t corruption even more widespread?

Exxon Mobil underscores climate-change risks. Businessweek wonders, given the extensive paper trail, whether Exxon Mobil Corp. could be held financially accountable for misleading the public about what it really knew about climate change. It raises the question of the limit to which a company can be held accountable; Big Tobacco was once asked a similar question and, while taken to task, they’re still around.

Act like you’re going under, because you might be. Be prepared to fail, says Chris Zook, a partner at management-consulting firm Bain & Co, writes for HBR. About 5%–7% of companies either are in free fall or are about to be, he says. And of those, he says just 10%–15% will ever pull out of it. Of those who do, he says, about half have to fundamentally change at least part of their business in order to save themselves.

The Morning Ledger from CFO Journal cues up the most important news in corporate finance every weekday morning. Send us tips, suggestions and complaints: maxwell.murphy@wsj.com. Get the free Morning Ledger emailed to you each weekday morning by clicking here, or at: http://on.wsj.com/TheMorningLedgerSignup